Alibaba’s Qwen hits #1 after free boba vouchers (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Okay, why does it look like in some of these videos, China is having a national boba emergency. Tons of delivery drivers absolutely packing these stores. We'll call it China's AI bubble tea. One of China's biggest tech companies, Alibaba, gave out millions of vouchers for free boba, all to get people to download its AI chatbot, Quen. You ask it to find bubble tea, it suggests options, you choose how much sugar you want, put in your address, and then done. The result, in just nine hours, people placed more than 10 million free drink orders, the company said. Some bubble tea shops were out of cups, other stores had to shut down for the day, and the app temporarily crashed. But Quen shot to number one on app stores in China, beating offerings from Alibaba rivals like Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu. All these Chinese tech giants are pouring billions of dollars into AI labs, a key part of Beijing's push to challenge Silicon Valley's early lead as US-China tensions continue to simmer. But in the increasingly heated domestic AI race, especially during the Lunar New Year holiday, when companies duke it out for attention and market share, Chinese tech firms are now enticing users, not just with better benchmarks, but also with tastier freebies, one bubble tea at a time.